The head of the QCA, Ken Boston, told a select committee of MPs on Monday 14^th July that the key stage 2 marking is now ‘100% complete’ despite hoards of complaints from parents and head teachers saying that they have still not received results.

The procedure for marking the tests was changed this year, with marking contractor ETS Europe taking over the process.  The company boasted additional checks to give greater assurance of high-quality marking. A spokesperson for the company said ‘ETS Europe regrets the inconvenience caused by the delay in issuing the national curriculum test results to schools. Our priority is to ensure that all of the tests are marked to a high standard, so that schools will receive accurate results to better serve the needs of their pupils’.

Warning signs started to appear back in May 2008 when schools reported difficulties in registering pupils on the new database that recorded which children took the English, maths and science tests.  The government has been criticised for not reacting to these difficulties as and when they were occurring. Speaking to the House of Commons, Ed Balls repeated that the responsibility for the problems lay with the QCA and ETS and himself declined to apologise.

It is estimated that approximately 1 in 4 schools lack results and it is not just missing results that are the issue - some head teachers have complained about the quality of the marking, claiming that some of their top pupils had received similar marks to children of much lower ability.

England’s National Assessment Agency (NAA), a subsidiary of QCA, has said that there is not an issue with the quality of the marking - it simply had not been done in time - and blamed the lateness on a ‘series of technical issues’ and described this as a serious failure.